


how deep the bullet lies

by bedfordfalls



Category: ATEEZ (Band)
Genre: Gen, Gender Dysphoria, M/M, Minor Kim Hongjoong/Park Seonghwa, Nonbinary Character, Semi-linear, Trans Character, eating disorders but only if u squint, open for interpretation it's up to yall tbh, vent fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:46:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25410355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bedfordfalls/pseuds/bedfordfalls
Summary: he lets it nest inside him, peeling away his skin in red petals when he faces anyone,if he faces anyone, to leave only muscle and bone behind
Comments: 10
Kudos: 17





	how deep the bullet lies

**Author's Note:**

> it goes without saying that this fic is a self indulgent way to have Problems and doesn't reflect any part of reality nor is it associated in any way with the people mentioned

There’s a monotony to his every day. Wake up. Make coffee. Sit back on the bed, swing his legs, stare at them. Get up and stare in the mirror. Sit back down and stare at the wall. Drip blood from his mouth when he finally walks into the common room and hears himself speak. The others have always ignored how he flinches at the space around him, the empty air between him and the rest of the world. They’re kind that way, he thinks, to close their eyes now and then. It’s a privacy he can’t afford himself. 

It ebbs and flows day by day, a dissatisfaction from the moment he opens his eyes that blooms into a raw pain and settles in his gut. He ignores it as best he can, which is to say he doesn’t ignore it at all, just works around it with all the diligence he’s built onto years of scar tissue foundation. He lets it nest inside him, though, peeling away his skin in red petals when he faces anyone, if he faces anyone, to leave only muscle and bone behind. 

He’s reluctant to face anyone today, to be social, more than most days, less than some. No one else has talked to him since the beginning of the afternoon, after he had mumbled his excuses about needing to work on a song and retreated to his room, turning his back on the heat of the glances exchanged. From through his door he can hear Wooyoung start to say something to San, low and unintelligible like they know he’s listening. He turns his music up and closes his eyes. 

The polished floor of the practice room is slick under his fingers as he sits in the corner. In the center, San and Seonghwa are dancing, running through the same bits of a song on repeat over and over, as if every time they finish they’ve found a new flaw. He cocks his head as he watches them, trying to figure out if the space they seem to create between them is really so walled off from him, cinderblocks stacked between his world and theirs. He glances at himself in the mirror, looking small in comparison, fragile but strangely warped, like he’s tried to shove the weeping flesh of his body through holes in rough stone but come out distorted somehow, and wrong. San smiles though, when he catches Hongjoong’s eye in the mirror, and asks him gleefully to come dance. Hongjoong doesn’t know how to reply, how to say _I can’t, because I’m not you. I can’t, because I’m in the wrong room and in the wrong building and in the wrong city and in the wrong world, and if I stood next to you I would melt like wax back into a child I don’t want to see._ Instead, he tells them he doesn’t feel much like dancing, not right now, and leaves. 

He eats dinner alone in his room, peeling chicken from the bone in tiny slivers and counting the bites, cross-legged in bed. His stomach rolls and he wipes his hands and pushes the plate away sharply. _This is action_ , he tells himself, _this is tangible this is praxis this is pattern this is choice this is formation_. He wants it to be metamorphosis of mind over body, but when he looks in the mirror as he’s brushing his teeth, the air feels just the same. 

_Après nous, le déluge._  
He cried the first time Seonghwa kissed him, a stinging in his eyes and then tears an instant later, pooling and running down his flushed cheeks silently. Seonghwa had jumped back like he’d been shocked, fear across his face like he had done something unspeakable, something vile, but Hongjoong’s hands followed him, clutching pathetically at the silk of his shirt. _It’s not you_ , he said over and over, _it’s not you it’s okay it’s okay._ Seonghwa sat there, running his hands through Hongjoong’s hair, not saying a thing. when Hongjoong opened his mouth to clarify, to reassure, the words died in his throat and all he could tell Seonghwa was a cracked apology that sounded like a language he hadn’t learned. 

He had tried to explain it later, of course, stumbling over the questions he expected, the ones he had heard before, the ones he would have said to himself a decade ago. The answers he gave Seonghwa unasked seemed stale, rituals learned from traumas he wasn’t sure he’d ever shared, a rite of apology for things he wasn’t sure he ever had needed to apologize for in the first place. He thought Seonghwa could tell, too, that something was missing. The hole in his chest was raw and bloody, something to reach your fingers into and ask what should have been there, and he says _I was born with it, it’s not to heal, it’s to exist. It’s to gape._ Seonghwa hugs him, tells him of course he loves him, of course, they’re friends, they’ve always been friends, nothing could change that. Nothing could change Hongjoong. Hongjoong cries in the shower, his body shaking in the icy water. 

San knocks on his door later in the evening to ask him if he wants to watch tv, trying to plaster a face of endearment over the lines of worry. Please, he says, we want you with us. When Hongjoong shakes his head, San closes the door behind him hesitantly, like he’s waiting for permission to come into a space that’s not his own. Hongjoong laughs at that, just slightly, that San could ever care if his space touched Hongjoong’s. He wants them to collide with each other so desperately, wants their worlds to crash into one another until they’re indeterminate, just fragments and smoke, until Hongjoong can touch what San has without being burned. 

_I’m sorry, it’s just not the same,_ he says, _I love you, I love you all until it feels like there’s nothing left inside of me but you’re not my place to be, not something I'm allowed to touch, it’s not my world to have._ “What about us?” San asks him in return, curious, “what if we enter yours instead?” And Hongjoong smiles at this, a real smile, tired and soft and making the tremor under San’s skin still for an instant. _I don’t have a world,_ he replies, _I’m just playing. One day I’ll have to come back to somewhere I don’t want to be._

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! if you liked this let me know, this was mostly a vent fic about my own feelings and experiences but i hope some of yall enjoyed it or related to it or got something out of it <3


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